Autopia as a New Episteme and New Theoretical Frameworks: The Car-oriented Perception of the City within a Transnational Network
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Author
Date
2021Type
- Conference Paper
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Abstract
This paper aims to present a new theoretical framework that would permit historiographies of architecture and urban design to take into consideration the impact of the car-oriented perception of the city. Its main objective is to shed light on the epistemological reorientations provoked by the advent of motorized transport in a transnational perspective. Special attention is paid to the decipherment of how the points of divergence in terms of cultural context provoked diversified responses to the epistemological shift related to the impact of the car on the transformation of the ways we perceive buildings when traversing urban fabric at speed. A key issue of this comparative transnational analysis is the examination of the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the different cultural and national contexts under study. The paper examines closely the ways in which the car, as a physical and perceptual presence, has influenced the design of welfare landscapes. Investigating cases from the UK, France, Italy, Sweden, and Norway, it explores how architects and urban designers started taking the car into full consideration when designing new neighbourhoods and cities. Among the cases that are analysed are the impact of the car on the work and thought of Alison and Peter Smithson in the UK, and the design of new towns in France such as the design for the new city extension of Toulouse-Le Mirail by Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic, and Shadrach Woods. The emergence of a new understanding of the citizens’ sensibilities due to the generalised use of the car in the post-war society is interpreted in relation to the welfare state. Alison Smithson’s concern, in AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, about the impact of mobility on our social patterns and social needs is understood here as closely connected to the design strategies that emerged within the context of post-war welfare state.
The paper aims to untie the specificity of car travel as a new episteme, taking into account the way that Michel Foucault understands the notion of episteme, and to explore the relationship between the process of taking photographs from the car and the emergence of new perceptual regimes in the field of architecture and urban design. Departing from the writings of Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, John Myer, Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – but also from John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denise Scott Brown and Aldo Rossi’s interest in taking photographs from the car – the paper establishes a broader conceptual framework for tackling the issues related to the impact of the automobile on architectural and urban thought, treating the different aspects of architects and urban designers’ automobile vision as expressions of the emergence of a new episteme. Particular emphasis is placed on explaining the relationship between the new episteme and the new perceptual regime that emerged thanks to the car. Telling regarding the understanding of car travel as a new episteme is Reyner Banham’s following remark, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante om the original, [he] learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”.
The paper also analyses an ensemble of photographs that architects such as John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Aldo Rossi took while travelling by car. It scrutinizes how new visual regimes in photography from the car by the architects under study informed in various ways their design strategies. The interexchange between the ways of capturing the views from the car and the formation of new design methods can explain the necessity to establish a new theoretical framework offering the possibility to historians of architecture and urban design to address in a sharp and concrete way the reciprocal relation between automobile vision and design approaches. The new theoretical framework that is suggested is based on two pairs of concepts: firstly, that between intentionality and causality; and secondly, that between stimulatory and documentary image. An understanding of these two tensions are useful for exploring to what extent the act of taking photographs by the architects under study is related to their desire to challenge these tensions. These tensions are closely connected to the dilemma regarding the capacity of photography or film to more concretely capture what I call “snapshot aesthetics” or “auto-photographic grasp” referring to the act of taking photographs from the car. The expression “autophotographic grasp” is employed to describe the “snapshot aesthetics” concerning the rapid, sequential and fragmentary perception of the urban territory from the car. Additionally, the paper explains why the view from the car is important for understanding the specificity of the gaze of the architects. It intends to render explicit that there is a necessity to shape interpretative tools that would make possible to diversify the ways of viewing the landscape and urban contexts while travelling by car. An aspect regarding the special status of the gaze at stake when the architects take photographs from the car while travelling is its “semi-directedness”. This “semi-directedness” refers to fact that their act of taking photographs is neither totally based on their intentionality nor absolutely connected to a spontaneous capture, but could be understood as placed somewhere in between. The architects’ act of taking photographs is neither totally instrumental nor absolutely spontaneous. This in-betweenness makes the photographs that the architects take while travelling by car a terrain or a nexus able to reveal the concreteness of their thought and design strategies. Show more
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https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000423442Publication status
publishedBook title
Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand: 37, What If? What Next? Speculations on History’s FuturesVolume
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)Event
Subject
automobile; history and theory of unban design; theory of photographyOrganisational unit
09643 - Avermaete, Tom / Avermaete, Tom
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG
Notes
Conference lecture held on November 20, 2020More
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